When Dad’s the Coach, What’s Fair Game?

FOR years I've coached my kids' teams - my three sons' baseball and basketball teams, my daughter's softball team. I didn't do it because I was a great athlete; I didn't even play high school sports. I've coached because a lot of the coaching I saw when my oldest was starting out was very bad.

I've found it hard to do well, and rarely do I feel I've achieved the right balance. It's fine to say winning doesn't matter, but try losing every game, as I did one year in our town basketball league. Kids lose interest. When you see the parents in town, you feel you owe them an explanation. ("That team we played last night was so stacked.") The joy goes out of the game and the players do, too. In their overprogrammed lives, the 0-8 basketball team falls to the bottom of the list.

My impetus to coach came as my oldest started baseball. He was 7 and had a coach - a nice man - who several times a game would say, "Winning isn't everything" - as if playing badly were a virtue. The nice coach loved to chat up parents in the middle of games, missing big stretches of the action on the field. The nice coach had few practices. At that age, the coaches pitch to the kids, and there's an art to a grown man throwing a ball to a four-foot-tall child. The nice coach didn't have it, so the kids didn't learn to hit. My son wanted to quit, and so I began coaching my kids.

I learned that trying to balance excellence and fairness, trying to win while giving every child the same chance regardless of ability, is not possible. Something has to give. If you want to win more games, you need to be more unfair.

In Little League softball, every girl until she is 10 is supposed to play at least one inning of infield per game. By 11 and 12, it's not required, and some coaches relegate their weakest players to a season of outfield.

I won't do that. However, this is not to say that I am fair. I do not let every girl play every position. That would be too fair; we'd lose too much. So you learn tricks - like keeping your best girls at pitcher, catcher, shortstop and first (nothing will collapse a team faster than a first baseman who drops routine throws). However, you will still lose games by being too fair. The girl who can't throw 10 feet, whom you think you've safely placed at third base? The ball will find her.

The most important thing you do as a coach happens weeks before the season starts: drafting your team. Though all the coaches are smiling and making small talk, you can't forget that they will do everything in their power to stack their teams. So as good a person as you are - and you are good, you're volunteering your precious time - you must be just as petty-minded to ensure that your team is adequately counterstacked. The year we didn't win a basketball game, I was on vacation during the draft.

Twice, another coach trying to stack his team told me that a standout player whom I'd been given in a blind draft would play only for him. Each time I stood my ground and said that we shouldn't let kids - or their parents - manipulate us. I called both families and explained how I felt. One of the kids, a girl, played for me and was a delight. The other, a boy, refused. Was standing on principle worth costing a 12-year-old a spring of baseball? I don't know.

The best coaches I've seen are hardest on their own kids. The worst coaches favor their kids and don't care about anyone else.

Either way, I suspect having your dad coach isn't as much fun as you first thought. When Annie was 10 she was pitching and couldn't find the plate in the fifth inning of a big game, walking in many runs. I went to the mound to calm her. "Relax," I said. "We'll get the runs back, you're doing fine."

"Right, Dad," she said, "I'm really doing great." When the inning was finally over, she walked off the mound and kept walking, until she'd reached our home 15 minutes away. She'd had enough of her coach and softball for one day.

This is my last season. After the kids reach 12, I happily hand them off to parents who are more skilled. The biggest change I've seen through the years is the way parents, dreaming of college scholarships, push their kids to specialize in a single sport sooner. This year, for the first time, our town will have no Little League for girls ages 13 to 16. The best girls have made traveling teams or switched to lacrosse.

We're all so busy. Before April vacation, I checked with parents, trying to squeeze in a practice between Easter and Passover. Eight girls said they'd come; three showed up.

My worst coaching moment came during my twins' fourth-grade C.Y.O. basketball season. We made the playoffs and won the first round against a better team with a perfect record. I was thrilled. Celebrating, the kids piled on top of each other on the gym floor. As I was lugging the equipment bag out, I was stopped by a young man and woman in their early 20s. They introduced themselves as the older brother and sister of a boy on my team. The boy was my weakest player. I didn't know it at the time, but he had a hard life, and this brother and sister were helping to raise him.

"It's wrong you played him so little," the sister said. "We're really disappointed." I mumbled something about having 12 kids and it being hard to give everyone equal time and the playoffs being different, but a thousand mumbles couldn't explain it away. This was fourth grade. The next playoff game I played my 12 more equally against a team with only 6 kids, all good. We lost.

I've done many good things in coaching, won a few titles, bought gloves and bikes for kids who didn't have them, driven hundreds of kids to games and practices for parents who couldn't be there. But shortchanging that fourth grader his minutes - and the courage of his older brother and sister to say so - is not something I can forget nor wholly forgive myself for.

It caused a permanent realignment in my internal coaching balance system.

Coaching is a small part of my identity, but it's how a lot of people know me. They see me at the supermarket, they say, "How's it going, Coach?" and I try to remember who their kid was and how long ago. During a visit to a school in town to talk about writing, I noticed a former player staring at me. At the end I said, "Anything wrong, Mary?"

"This is the first time I saw you without a baseball cap," she said.

It's a big position, coach.

E-mail: parenting@nytimes.com